a stethoscope around his neck. Realizing he must be the coroner, Steven almost loses consciousness. Later, when the cops come back, Mark goes over to one of them and asks whether the body is Rey’s, but the officer won’t tell him. A few moments later, a policeman approaches the three friends, introduces himself as a detective from the Baltimore police’s Central District, and tells them they need to come downtown with him. Steven, Mark, and George get shakily to their feet, and the detective leads them through the crowds in the lobby, into the street, and into an unmarked vehicle. Through the wing mirror, as they drive away, Steven glimpses a local news anchorman straightening his tie.
The concierge on duty at the Belvedere that day is a capable, heavyset gentleman in his fifties named Gary Shivers. At the request of a man who introduces himself as a police detective, Shivers goes into the room behind the front desk to find the keys to the offices on the second floor, then leads the police and the pack of cadets up two long, steep flights of stairs, through a double set of doors, and down the hallway toward the annex. Taking a right turn, he leads the parade past the second-floor freight elevators and pushes open a door at the top of three steps. This door opens onto a narrow hallway leading to the hotel’s former swimming pool. When the Belvedere was turned into a condominium complex in 1991, this space was divided into two offices, each with a half-barrel skylight and a row of windows at the top of its eastern wall.
One of these offices belongs to the Belvedere’s in-house catering company, which at that time was a business called Truffles. The other is empty, although its opaque glass door announces it as the headquarters of the Army of God Church in Christ and the Elijah School of the Prophet Institute. This Pentecostal congregation was using the space when D. and I first moved into the building in March 2005. It took us a while to locate the source of the praying and chanting on Sunday mornings, and when we realized it was coming from the old swimming pool below our apartment window, we were worried that it might become annoying. But the Army of God Church in Christ soon found a new home, and by early April 2006, the Sunday-morning hallelujahs had ceased.
The Truffles staff have been complaining about a bad smell for the last few days. They think there might be a dead rat in the wall. When they hear Gary and the police arriving, they stick their heads out of their office to see what all the fuss is about.
Gary is fumbling among all the keys on his big key ring, trying to work out which one fits the door of the vacant office. He isn’t thinking about how the hole got in the office roof. When he finally locates the right key, he opens the door and lumbers into the room. He’s taken three or four steps across the floor before the smell hits him and he realizes he’s looking at a dead body.
Gary Shivers turns and runs. He runs past the lead detective, who’s casually taking out a stick of Vicks VapoRub. He runs past the girls from Truffles, who later tell me that Gary, who is black, had “turned white.” He runs all the way downstairs to the basement, runs down the hallway and past Antiques at the Belvedere, then bursts out through the side door into the heat of the afternoon. He runs west across Charles Street and up the steps into Zena’s salon. Zena is in the middle of a manicure when Gary bursts through the door, shaking and sweating. He tells Zena he has had a shock and he needs a drink. Zena asks one of the girls to take over her client’s manicure. She leads Gary to the back room where he can sit down, and fetches a shot glass and a bottle.
Gary closes his eyes and swallows. He takes three shots. By the third he is no longer shaking. But he knows it’s too late. He’ll never forget what he has just seen.
Zena asks him what happened.
“A dead man fell out of the ceiling,” says Gary.
When the Truffles girls realize that what they thought was a dead rat in the wall was, in fact, a dead person, they can’t avoid thinking about the wedding reception held at the Belvedere four days ago. The bride and groom were photographed in rooms on the second floor. Violets Are Blue, a wedding photography website, still features images from the reception. In one of the photographs, the loving couple can be glimpsed looking down romantically from a window in the old hotel. In another room on the same floor, at the very time this photo was shot, Rey Rivera’s dead body was decaying in the summer heat.
Half an hour after the body has been removed from the Belvedere, I come down to take my dog for his afternoon walk. The building is still swarming with police. Charles Street has been closed to traffic and pedestrians. Crime scene tape is tied from one side of the road to the other. I ask one of the officers what’s going on. He tells me they’re “conducting an investigation.” He refuses to say anything else. Turning away, I see a neighbor walking his elderly dachshund, and ask if he has any idea what’s happening.
He’s heard they found a body. “They think it’s that missing guy.”
I finish my walk and return to our apartment. Upstairs, I open the living room window and wedge myself tightly into the frame, which gives me an almost perfect view of cops climbing around on the annex roof. A small group of people is also observing the scene from the top floor of the parking garage directly opposite.
We all watch as two policemen use a ladder to get from the second to the third level of the annex roof, then from the third to the fourth. One of the cops goes to retrieve the flip-flops and cell phone, almost indiscernible against the dark membrane of the roof. I can see the hole. It is just within my line of vision, and seems remarkably small for someone of Rivera’s height and weight. It’s almost circular, not one of those people-shaped holes you see in cartoons.
Even though they can see we’re watching them, the cops are surprisingly casual about the whole thing. The first cop is on the pool roof. The second cop stays on the lower level, holding the ladder. The first cop picks up a flip-flop and throws it down to his colleague on the lower level. He then throws the second flip-flop, which almost hits the other guy on the head. The second cop yells something at the first cop, who laughs and yells something back. I do not see them putting anything in an evidence bag, taking photographs, or checking for fingerprints. Neither that day nor at any time afterward does anybody knock on our door to ask questions about anything we might have seen; nor, as far as we know, do the police interview any of our neighbors.
Some accounts, confusing the mystery further, report that Rivera’s corpse was found in an “old church adjoining the Belvedere hotel.”
___________
At the Central District police station downtown, George Rayburn, Steven King, and Mark Whistler are sent to wait in a room painted in bright colors, with children’s toys and games scattered around the floor. It’s completely wrong. A television is tuned to WJZ-TV, a local channel. When the news comes on, the men see images of the Belvedere, and a long line of police cadets entering the hotel. The news announcer, Richard Sher, reports that a body found in “a conference room of the Belvedere Hotel” has been identified as that of “the missing financial writer Rey Rivera.” The three men sit in silence again, this time for hours. Eventually, they’re brought out one by one to be interviewed separately by detectives, one of whom is either so tired, so bored, or so hung-over that he actually falls asleep while interviewing George. The questions they ask are strange and inappropriate—for instance, “Where are your parents?”
After this comes more silence. None of the three friends are interested in speaking to the press, so whenever anyone contacts them, they forward the inquiries to their company’s public relations officer. Jayne Miller, an investigative reporter, tries repeatedly to contact George. He talks to her once, very briefly. Among the three men, there is little discussion of the incident. Steven King enters therapy to deal with it. George Rayburn continues working for the same subsidiary until 2013, when he joins King at the Oxford Club. The year after Rey’s death, Mark Whistler is let go from his job.
Once the corpse has been removed, the police have left, and all the commotion is over, I find my way down to the former swimming pool. I assume the door will have been sealed by police tape and I’m surprised to find it propped open—to get rid of the smell, I imagine. There is nothing to prevent me from entering the room.
From beneath, the hole is substantially bigger than it appears from above. The ceiling is half collapsed; some of the rafters and roof beams have fallen in, and the musty carpet